Who Doesn’t Love a Good Sea Chantey?

In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, the producer Hal Willner created a series of superb tribute albums that specialized in surprising combinations of performers and material. There was “Stay Awake: Reinterpretations of the Music of Walt Disney,” on which Sinéad O’Connor’s lovely version of “Someday My Prince Will Come” sat alongside Sun Ra’s wild “Pink Elephants on Parade” and Tom Waits’ terrifying take on “Heigh-Ho.” There was “Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus,” where a crack jazz band that included Bill Frisell and Art Baron backed a spoken-word performance by Chuck D, and Keith Richards sang “Mama, Don’t Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me.” Other Willner projects tackled the music of Nino Rota, Thelonious Monk, and Kurt Weill; all of the albums were masterpieces of felicitous collision.

Willner went on to craft spoken-word records for Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, to compile a mammoth six-CD set of historic Lenny Bruce recordings, and to stage several concerts that functioned as live versions of his brilliantly eclectic albums. But for the better part of the last decade, he’s turned his attention to piracy. Not the theft of digital files. Rather, he’s focused on the traditional songs associated with actual pirates. In 2005, he produced “Rogues Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys,” a compilation of songs created with the blessing of Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinski, the star and director of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise. “There was this idea that this music, pirate music, was the original punk,” Willner said. “I think initially they envisioned it more as a hard-rock record, but when I came on, it took the direction it took.”

Willner compiled a master list of songs. “You’re talking about hundreds of things we were considering,” he said. “Eventually I shortened it to about forty, and then I started to cast people. Most singers I sent six choices to, but sometimes I had a specific idea and sometimes they had something they’d like to do.” After singers and songs were paired, Willner set about shepherding them into the studio. “Volume one was very easy,” he said. “We went to England and put together a band there. Kate St. John and Roger Eno and Andy Newmark. I made calls to singers and they were all in town: in one day, we got Dave Thomas, Nick Cave, Bryan Ferry, Martin Carthy. I love that kind of thing. I remember at one of the concerts we did later, Beth Orton said that she had forgotten why she wanted to be in this business, and this reminded her.”

The record was a success (“Well, it didn’t lose money,” Willner said), and there was interest in hoisting the flag again. But the sequel, “Son of Rogue’s Gallery,” which will be released later this month, was longer in coming. “When we did the first one, Tom Waits was the first person I talked to, and then Keith Richards, and then Shane MacGowan,” he said. “None of them ended up on it, for one reason or another. Plus, there were some tracks left over from the first one: tracks that didn’t find their way to the right singer, or unfinished material. For whatever reason, these sessions were slower in coming: they happened mostly one by one.” Over the years, Wilner patched together three dozen more pirate songs, including nautical-themed recordings by the likes of Dr. John (“In Lure of the Tropics”), Jarvis Cocker (“A Drop of Nelson’s Blood”), Macy Gray (“Off To Sea Once More”), Michael Stipe and Courtney Love (“Rio Grande”), and Mary Margaret O’Hara (“Then Send the Captain to Me”). Richards and Waits are there, swashbuckling their way through “Shenandoah,” and MacGowan belts out “Leaving of Liverpool” with Depp and Verbinski. Overall, the sequel has a slightly different tone than its predecessor: Petra Haden’s performance of “Sail Away Raymond,” a song that George Harrison wrote for Ringo Starr, might not have fit on the first volume. “It’s a happier record overall,” Willner said. But the Jollier Roger mood doesn’t color the full proceedings: Richard Thompson’s “General Taylor” and Michael Gira’s “Whiskey Johnny” are as traditional as anything on the earlier set.

Are there enough pirate songs in the world for a third volume? Willner tilts his head for a mental count. “Sure,” he said. “I could do a third.” (Or maybe, with Depp and Verbinski now in Lone Ranger mode, Willner can go from sea to land and release albums of cowboy songs.) In the meantime, we are pleased to première a song from the collection, a collaboration between Patti Smith and Johnny Depp on Smith’s “The Mermaid Song.”

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